BodyConstitution’s program in the domain of research in practice at the Grotowski Institute is aimed at people who deeply wish to recognize their acting skills in confrontation with preexpressive techniques and vocal tradition which are still being ignored or simply remain unknown as a source of actor’s material.

Four Centres – Body and Space
Workshop
Led by: Jarosław Fret with assistance of Monika Wachowicz
National Theatre, Dye house, 28.April - 01.May 2022

Comprehensive sessions dedicated to the actor’s dramaturgy. The Change (meaning a situation that got disturbed), and the ability to recognize it, is the main and fundamental aspect of every drama. How an actor, a performer can work for readability of her/his own line of actions? How, by making a live stream of permanent movements, structure them within their inner microdramaturgical potentiality? How to create a body/text with no recourse to a common body language? The session will confront two main practical ideas which are fundamentally connected in the actor’s craft: the Organic Field and the Dramatic Field, interwoven and depended on each other.

The project is based on the work of studios and artistic groups that set out to analyze in practice selected cultures and philosophies of body expression (such as Martial Arts, Aikido and Capoeira), as well as singing traditions (Georgian and Corsican polyphonies), and by applying their principles in actor or performer training. The BodyConstitution opens up the possibility to create one’s own constitution of the body; it combines practice and reflection to build a deep body culture of the actor’s and performer’s work.

The project centers on complex holistic, physical and vocal training, its problems and self-study; on opening up to new sources of theatre work; and on an innovative methodology of the actor’s work focused on his/her self-development with particular emphasis on self-diagnosis and the ability to communicate the actor’s processes. One of the main premises of the project is a belief that the creative development of artistic work methods is possible mainly through the constant confrontation of learned techniques with the experience, richness and variety of methods developed by teachers and artists from other traditions and cultures.

We start with the premise that your body is your Constitution. How do we rework the ‘sources’ both in training and in working on the actor’s material that we recast into scene material so that it can later become integrated into performance? Do we notice the three registers in which the source material is simultaneously transferred to the realm of the actor’s work? The registers are best described by three words: transmission, transition and transgression. In what proportions are these three registers present in the actor’s work? How the material collected during research is ‘translated’ and to what extent its transfer breaks down the boundaries set by tradition and source techniques?

The project will research how a role builds not just a line of recreated behavior but, first of all, how it builds a line of recreated or recomposed experience. As a part of BodyConstitution, it is a creative extension of the activities focused around acting techniques that have been happening at the Grotowski Institute since 2004 within a program line called Source Techniques/Sources of Techniques.

(07 April 2022)